draining development.pdf - Khazar University

464 Draining Development?Africa. 4 Because the rents from mineral and energy extraction are solarge and because the extraction processes are so distinctive, concentrated,and rooted in particular locations for long periods of time, wenow know quite a lot about their impacts on politics and governance inthe source countries. 5 First, the extraction of point natural resources, inalmost all cases, greatly enriches the political elites that control the locationswhere the extraction takes place. It provides revenues to both politicalelites and states. Even in more bureaucratically organized states withsome elements of formal electoral democracy, state energy corporations,often described as a state within a state, are bastions of privilege andextraconstitutional power (de Oliveira 2007; Winters 1996). Second, theextraction of point natural resources tends to generate relatively exclusionary,monopolistic, and militarized rule. Third, governments fundedprincipally through point natural resource extraction tend to treat theircitizens badly in terms of civil and political rights, health and educationservices, and public infrastructure provision because they have so littleneed of their citizens. Natural resource wealth frees governments fromtheir normal motivations to nurture at least some prosperous taxpayers,affluent mass consumers, healthy and educated workers, appreciativevoters, or fit and skilled military recruits (Bräutigam, Fjeldstad, andMoore 2008; Moore 2007). Cash from oil and minerals obviates the needfor a booming economy and tax revenues and pays for the recruitmentof mercenaries and (politically docile) immigrant workers to provideessential skills.The international drug economySince the 1960s, there has been a big increase in opportunities for illegalrent-taking through the production of drugs in poorer countries anddrug trafficking into rich countries. One cause has been increasingwealth and growing consumer demand in rich countries. Another hasbeen the growth in air travel. The third is symbolized by the 1961 UnitedNations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which represented thecreation, under U.S. leadership, of an activist, punitive global antidrugregime that increased the monetary rewards for producers, traffickers,and the people in authority who were bribed to cooperate with them. 6In part because of these dimensions of late 20th-century globalization,a new concept and a new problem have, over the past two decades,